The only daycares that we can afford dont accept cloth diapers. Is it still worth it to buy cloth diapers only to use at home? Considering all the accessories needed for cloth diapering such as the sprayer, pail, wet bag etc I'm just wondering if its still a good investment if we only use it at home or on the weekends. Does anyone only use cloth diapers for weekends and nights?
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We invested in cloth and used them exclusively throughout my maternity leave, and it worked great. However, our daycare doesn't take cloth, and when we tried to move towards only using cloth at home, we decided it just wasn't worth it. He was only in two diapers a day at home, and we found that we really needed to do laundry every day (or at least every other day) to combat the stinkies, and it just wasn't worth it to me to have to do laundry four times a week when most of the time I was only washing 2-3 diapers. We still have all our diapers, and I feel like if our care circumstances change I'd like to try it again, but it wasn't working for us right now.
If we have another one, I think I'd still cloth diaper throughout maternity leave, using prefolds and covers (which are the cheapest method anyhow) and then move to disposables for daycare (which was right about when he was outgrowing the covers we had anyhow. -
I should, however, note that we do have other friends who CD at night and on weekends only, and it works fine for them.
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I don't think I would do it. Like @Lozza said, that's a lot of laundry for not a lot of diapers. And since you're doing weekends you'll still have to buy a lot of diapers- we have two days worth and do a wash every two days. So you won't be able to save money even though you're diapering less.
But everyone has a different system/way of doing things and I'm sure many other people do it. I'd just be too lazy.
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We use them at home, but daycare it's disposables. It doesn't as cost much because you aren't using them 24/7. So a pack can last a LONG time.
It may not be smart to some, but I like how we are doing it. Plus I researched and it's only 3 or 4 daycares that allow cloth in GA.
Yes, I mean the whole state.
Lame.
Good luck with what you choose! Make sure to research diapers. My daughter can't use Pampers- major rashes.
We use Honest diapers at daycare now though.
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We are in the same situation. We've decided to get a set of newborn CD (probably Kissaluvs) and try it out during my maternity leave to see if it's something that fits into our lifestyle, and we figure that's when we will be going through a ton of diapers anyway. If it is working for us, we are going to try and broach things with the daycare to find out their objections, bring in an example diaper, and see if they will reconsider their stance. There is no health code in our state preventing them from using CD, so all we are asking is for them to put our child's dirty diapers in a sealed wetbag we will provide instead of the trash. We would likely use pocket diapers so there's no difference to putting them on vs. a disposable.
If they still won't do it, we'll decide from there if we want to move forward using CD nights and weekends and buy larger diapers. We figure we can keep the newborn diapers for the next child, or worst case, if we hate the whole idea, resell them and be out a similar amount to what we would have spent on a newborn rental package.
A friend of mine does CD at home only, and she says it's still worth it to her family. One good thing that she pointed out was her diapers are not wearing out as fast, and will definitely last through both her kids potty training.
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Would your daycare options use a cover with a disposable insert? I'm thinking of something like Gro-Via. Just a thought and a possible compromise with your daycare.
If they would allow that you could use the disposable inserts at daycare and get the snap in soakers for home and just reuse the shells. You wouldn't have to but as much cloth things and I know places like Alice.com and Costco sell Gro-Via insets.
As far as all the CDing extra your don't have to have a sprayer (we rarely use ours), a fancy pail, wet bags...you could just reuse grocery bags for wet bags and your pail could be anything. I thought you needed fancy detergent but I found dropps work best for us, and although we use cloth wipes we just use water instead of special solutions as plan water turned out to work best for DS (solutions caused rashes). My point is that looking back there is a lot I could have done without and really cut bak on the CD budget. If I had to do it again I wouldn't invest in a lot of those things.
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@anbanan15: Exactly. I don't have a sprayer and the pail is a flip top trshcan.LOL I have a wet bag I sewed, but I refused to buy one.
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@Mrsbells: this is why I decided against cloth, my daycare doesn't accept them either. As a working Mom, it would be so much trouble to deal with all of the laundry of cloth diapers at home plus remembering to take disposable diapers to daycare (and remembering to put the lo in a disposable in the morning)!
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Thanks everyone.. I will have to think about it more and do the math to see what makes sense for us. I was really set on using cloth diapers though..
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We use gdiapers cloth during the day and disposables at night, I didn't buy anything extra to cloth diaper. I use a pail that I had lying around the house for dirties, but I did invest in some wetbags because they're convenient for dirty clothing, not just diapers, when you're out and about.
I'd see if you can use a system with disposable inserts, as someone else suggested. It can't hurt to ask, and you can use cloth at home.
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I dont know much about disposable inserts.. will have to look into it. The cost of that will still be in addition out first choice of diapers which is the Freetime Bum Genius all in ones.
After discussing with my husband I think overall we will still save if we use cloth diapers at home and use disposables at the day care.
We use Honest diapers at daycare now though.
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